Hi, Deab.
Thanks for the feedback! I agree the UI/UX needs work and the Commander creation screen is far from ideal. I'll see what I can do about escape closing top level menus and adding some sort of randomized default names for the Commander.
Regarding grenades: One of the reasons I made them drop at the marine location instead of being thrown is I wanted more emphasis on marine positioning. I would like more feedback about this from other players, but generally realism is not a reason I find particularly persuasive, although if everyone is constantly confused by this I would take that as a sign!
The difficulty of each planet/derelict ship is not perfectly balanced. Each level has a set pool of enemies that can potentially be spawned (e.g. robot enemies tend to appear on robot ships, alien enemies tend to appear on alien ships), and so there is variance there. While it's not immediately clear to new players what those pools are, part of the information given is what armor upgrades are given at each planet. I felt that this coupled with random classes for your starting marine squad might help influence players.
The damage of ranged enemies could be lowered somewhat. As there are no difficulty levels/options in SM2 as of right now I was trying to reach a moderate level of difficulty but I probably missed that on my first shot. I am getting gameplay analytics so I'll be adjusting based on what I see!
Yes, the fog of war may be a bit overbearing on some wall/door sections, I'll take a look at that. I have plans to adjust bloom and such in a future update so players can decide on how much visual eye candy they want.
May I ask what platform (Win/Mac) and version you're on? First I've heard of the exit button not working!